Non-invasive surgical procedures advantageously allow a surgeon to treat an internal area of a body without having to create a large physical opening in the exterior skin of the body. Many non-invasive procedures are specialized to treat a particular area of the body, such as an organ. Percutaneous nephrolithonomy (or “PCNL”), for example, is one such procedure, wherein an object, such as a needle, is inserted through the body and into a kidney for removal of a kidney stone. Precise placement of the needle is required to avoid damaging the kidney. Therefore, medical imaging techniques, such as fluoroscopy, may be used in PCNL procedures to both locate a kidney and track the location of the needle with respect to the located kidney.
Many imaging technologies are limited to producing an image of the body within a single imaging plane. For fluoroscopy, the imaging plane is defined with respect to the imaging plane of an x-ray beam. These technologies may be used to locate an organ, and determine a distance between an object and the organ; however, they are often ill-suited for guiding the object to the organ. For example, a PCNL needle may be pushed out of the imaging plane by bodily tissue, requiring the surgeon to either reposition the imaging plane with respect to the needle and the kidney, which is time consuming; or navigate the body based solely on tactile sensation, which is imprecise and potentially harmful to the body. Moreover, because many of these imaging technologies produce a two dimensional image of a three dimensional body, they may skew or blur the geometrical relationship between the object and the body. In PCNL procedures, for example, these limitations can make it difficult for the surgeon to determine whether the needle is being advanced towards the kidney along a desired insertion angle.